FASTEST anti-virus around!

manveruppd · 28 Jan 2009 at 21:09

An old and slooooooow (475MHz K6, 64MB RAM) laptop needs a virus check. I tried two of the free online virus scanners (Kaspersky's and TrendMicro's), but, in both cases, Java loads so slowly that the virus scanner brings up a "Java has failed to load" error before it's finished! (Tried this with Opera, Explorer and Firefox, and verified my Java installation on Sun's site so I know it's working ok - even though verifying it took about 15'!)

I therefore have to install a proper anti-virus on it, even though I didn't want to because it will make it crawl! Now, the fastest in my experience is Antivir, but even that, I think, will be too much for that machine! On this PC (C2D 3GHz, 4GB RAM), Task Manager shows Antivir's peak memory usage to be about 2.5 times the total RAM that old lappy has, so I reckon a virus scan, if it were to ever complete at all, would make the hard disk thrash like an epileptic fish out of water and die.

Can anyone suggest a faster antivirus or online scanner?

eXor · 28 Jan 2009 at 21:54

If it's that slow, why not run a lighter OS on it? What do you use it for?

You could always image the partitions into a VM on a more powerful machine and run the scan from there.

manveruppd · 28 Jan 2009 at 21:56

win2k, it used to be fast enough for general use but it's slowed down over the months. I know nothing about virtualisation so what you say is impossible to me!

Brian Stuart · 28 Jan 2009 at 22:13

Take out the drive, install as a slave on another PC and virus scan it that way.

ChrisB · 28 Jan 2009 at 22:20

Have a look at the older NOD32 versions:
http://www.eset.com/products/win9x.php

reflux · 28 Jan 2009 at 22:22

NOD32 is AFAIK one of the fastest around.

swinnie · 28 Jan 2009 at 22:25

How about integrate an AV into a boot disk such as BartPE and scan outside of Windows?

John24 · 29 Jan 2009 at 20:11

NOD32 without a doubt, turn of the heuristics scanning too, that`ll speed it up even more.